African-Language Writing

"How did this new genre come into being? Why did it assume this particular shape and form rather than another? When or at what point did it assume this new shape and what outside factors contributed to it? As it travelled along Zimbabwe's dusty roads, which roads were open to it and which were closed?" asks George Kahari at the opening of his magisterial study of the Shona novel (1).

African-language writing in general offers an unparalleled laboratory in which to ask questions about innovation and creativity about new genres and how they come into being; about the innumerable, protean ways in which orality combines with literacy; about the changing constitution of publics and imagined communities; about cultural nationalism and forms of the imagination that exceed cultural nationalism; and about the self-conception and representation of the individual through writing. African-language writing is a field of intense creative experimentation. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, old written traditions such as those of Ethiopia and the Swahili coast underwent radical transformation, and in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, wholly new written literatures were forged in the context of intense social change, conflict, resistance to domination, and acquisition of new cultural forms. Many written literary genres were pioneered by a new class of literati—mission-educated, often working as teachers or churchmen—and literary texts participated in a discursive sphere established by the African-language newspapers as well as by the school system. They were associated with public debates about progress and modernity. But to a greater degree than literature written in European languages, they were also close to older oral traditions and to local popular culture, offering a view of cultural history from a different vantage point.

Literary history happened at high speed. New genres emerged, expanded, and were rapidly transformed, sometimes spontaneously, sometimes as a result of conscious decisions taken by writers' associations or by government bodies. Lone individuals carried out breathtaking experiments, writing away behind closed doors while their people wondered what they were up to. But enduring collective traditions were also established, shared conventions adopted. Simply as a social fact, the profusion, diversity, and dynamism of African-language writing demands to be understood and historically interpreted. But of course it is also more than a social fact. The texts discussed in this special issue are works of the imagination and constructions of language, unique and often brilliant. Students of African literature could do worse than spend a lifetime learning the language, conventions, allusions, and cultural assumptions that would be needed in order fully to appreciate just one of these texts. And African-language writing is not a closed-off phenomenon; it exists in intertextual relations with anglophone and francophone African literary texts, and provides a perspective on them that can be highly illuminating.

African-language creative writing is a fruitful arena for inquiry, then. But in what sense is it a coherent field? Fine individual studies of African-language authors, texts, and genres have been written. But the conceptualization of African-language writing as a field, which Alain Ricard has most recently pushed for,is in its early stages. The beginnings of such an inquiry have gone in two main directions. The first is the production of surveys and overviews documenting the history and distribution of written genres across Africa. Two of these at least (Andrzejewski et al., Gérard) reflect profound and impressively wide-ranging scholarship. They provide an invaluable starting point, for where extensive translations do not exist, it is a major task to bring disparate traditions and histories into a comparative frame. We work in an environment of specialization where individual scholars produce superb bodies of work on a single genre or language tradition without, it seems, expecting specialists on other, adjacent cultures to be the slightest bit interested. The mapping of written African literature (and, in the case of Andrzejewski et al., the mapping together of oral and written traditions from sample cultures across the continent) has provided the basis for a more searching comparative analysis.

The other main approach to African-language writing as a field has revolved...